BSD KNOW YOUR BIBLE: Ezra 10 - Nehemiah 1 Study Notes by Avraham ben Yaakov EZRA CHAPTER 10 Judah has dealt treacherously and a disgusting thing has been done in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah has profaned the holiness of HaShem that He loved, and has married the daughter of a strange god… (Malachi 2:11). In the Talmud, Rav Nahman brings this verse as support for the statement by R. Yehoshua ben Korhah that Malachi is identical with Ezra, one of whose greatest achievements was to eliminate the blight of intermarriage that cut at the very foundations of the people. It was the sight of this saintly priest and prophet in the newly built Temple, praying, weeping and confessing in the name of the entire nation, that brought all the assembled people to a great swell of Teshuvah, with all the men, women and children weeping (v 1). And SHECHANIYAH the son of YEHIEL from the children of EILAM answered and said to Ezra, We have trespassed against our God and have taken alien women… (v 2). It is interesting that in verse 26, where YEHIEL is listed among the children of Eilam who had taken foreign wives, his son Shechaniyah is NOT mentioned as one of those who had done so. Yet Shechaniyah still stepped forward to confess. Why? The Talmud explains by telling how one time while R Judah the Prince was teaching his disciples, he smelled a strong smell of garlic. He told whoever had eaten garlic to leave. His best student, R. Hiyya, immediately got up and left, and then everyone else also got up and left. The following morning R. Judahs son Shimon found R. Hiyya and asked how he could dare offend his father – until R. Hiyya confessed that he had not eaten garlic at all. From whom did R. Hiyya learn this way of saving others from embarrassment? From R. Meir. For once a woman came into the Beis Midrash and said One of you made me his wife by sleeping with me. On hearing this R. Meir immediately got up and wrote her a Get (bill of divorce) and on seeing this, all the other students also wrote her a Get… And who did R. Meir learn it from? From Shmuel HaKatan. And Shmuel HaKatan learned it from Shechaniyah the son of Yehiel (Sanhedrin 11a). Getting up first in front of everyone to confess to having intermarried was a courageous act on the part of Shechaniyah that was intended to make it easier for all those who really were guilty to confess and begin to repair the damage. Shechaniyah asked Ezra to set the process in motion, and the latter – continuing his fasting and repentance – gave orders for all the returnees to assemble in Jerusalem, warning that anyone who failed to do so would be penalized by having all his property declared ownerless (v 8). This verse is the foundation for the law that Beis Din (a rabbinic court) is entitled to use the sanction of declaring the property of recalcitrant individuals HEFKER, ownerless and free for anyone to take (Shekalim 3b). This great national assembly was held on the 20th of the month of Kislev (v 9) – which is in December at the height of Israels rainy season, usually one of the coldest, windiest times in Jerusalem. We can imagine what a chilly, sorrowful occasion it was as the bedraggled crowd confronted the enormity of what they had allowed to happen during their exile. Everyone was willing to do what was necessary to purify the nation, but it was simply too cold to stand outside in the rain now and complete the very delicate and time-consuming work needed to rectify the flaw. Ezra laid down a timetable for the returnees from the various different cities of the exile to appear together with their elders and judges in order to check into what had happened in each family and separate Israelites from their foreign wives and children. We need only try to imagine what it would take today to separate home-born Jews who have intermarried from their non-Jewish spouses and children in order to get a glimmer of understanding of the enormous, heart-rending enterprise Ezra carried out in his time with priests, Levites and Israelites alike. NEHEMIAH 1 The book of Nehemiah is a direct continuation of the book of Ezra. In Ezra 2:2 Nehemiah was numbered among the leaders of the FIRST WAVE of returnees who had gone up out of exile to Jerusalem together with Zerubavel and Yehoshua the High Priest while Ezra remained in Babylon. In Ezra 2:63 Nehemiah was mentioned under his name HATIRSHATHA (see Nehemiah 10:2) as having forbidden those priests who were unable to bring written proof of their priestly lineage from eating sacrificial meat. Nehemiah evidently returned to exile at some point thereafter to join and presumably lead the sizeable communities that remained in Babylon, Persia and other centers. We have evidence in our text of a certain two-way traffic between Israel and the Diaspora of those days, though it was probably less intense than the two-way jet air traffic that exists today between Tel Aviv, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and other Jewish centers worldwide. As we shall presently see, Nehemiah rose to a top position in the Persian royal court – in the same tradition of outstanding Tzaddikim like Daniel and Ezra who also had the ear of the emperor kings of their times. The first wave of returnees had come up to Jerusalem in the first year of the reign of Cyrus of Persia in 3390 (370 B.C.E.). They had laid the foundations of the Temple Altar, but owing to the opposition of the adversaries it was not until eighteen years later that they were able to build the Temple in the year 3408 (352 B.C.E.). Ezra came up from Babylon to Jerusalem seven years later in 3415 (345 B.C.E.), and it was then that he began his work of separating the people from their foreign wives as told in the closing chapters of the book of Ezra. The book of Nehemiah opens in the twentieth year (Nehemiah 1:1) but does not specify in the twentieth year of what! The rabbis learned from GEZEIRAH SHAVAH with the identical phrase in Nehemiah 2:1 that this was in the twentieth year of ARTAHSHASTA = Darius king of Persia (Rosh Hashanah 3a, see Rashi on Nehemiah 1:1). This was in the year 3426 (334 B.C.E.) – i.e. ELEVEN YEARS after Ezras Aliyah to Jerusalem. In other words, with the opening of the book of Nehemiah we have one again fast-forwarded, this time to eleven years after the events described at the end of the book of Ezra, passing over in silence the details of all that happened in the intervening years. We are not told until the closing words of our present chapter (Nehemiah 1:11) exactly who Nehemiah is. It turns out that he is no less than the personal wine-butler of Darius king of Persia – a prestigious position of influence if ever there was one, since you get the king at his most mellow moments. Of course a kings butler has to taste the wine every time before he serves it to prove that it has not been poisoned, and since the Persian kings wine was YAYIN NESECH (idolatrous wine), the rabbis of the time gave a special license to Nehemiah to drink it even though YAYIN NESECH is normally strictly forbidden for Jewish consumption. This is the reason why Nehemiah was given the name HATIRSHATHA: HATIR means permitted, SHATHA means he drank (see Rashi on Ezra 2:63, Yerushalmi Kiddushin 41b). It was precisely because Nehemiah was not only a great, open-hearted Tzaddik but also one who had the ear of the king of Persia, head of the great superpower of the day, that it was so fortuitous that Hanani and his companions, visiting the Golus from Jerusalem, came to him and told him the latest news about his brothers in Jerusalem (Nehemiah v 2). The great jubilation at the time of the aliyah of Ezra eleven years earlier carrying a letter of authorization from that same king Darius had given way to a cry of pain from the harassed residents of Judah. The walls of Jerusalem were broken down and marauding adversaries were engaged in an intense intifada, burning down the houses without regard for the authority of the king of Persia, who was many, many hundreds of miles away and who in any case had little interest in backing up his letter of authorization by engaging his armies to deal with a local squabble in one of his many provinces. The news of the plight of the returnees threw Nehemiah into mourning, weeping and fasting, and he offered the eloquent prayer recorded in our chapter, phrases from which are included in some of the prayers and supplications in our Siddur (prayer book) and Selichos (penitential prayers). Nehemiah delicately alludes to Gods promise that if the exiles of Israel would repent, He would gather them in to His chosen place (v 9) – as if to say, now that they have returned, please PROTECT THEM!!! Nehemiah continued – since he had some PROTEKTZIA with the king of Persia – asking for God to grant him favor with the king – showing that it is permissible for us to pray for success in our dealings with other people. In the ensuing chapters we will see how Nehemiah asked the king of Persia for a temporary leave of absence (which lasted twelve years) in order to go to Jerusalem, where he not only built the city walls to protect the population physically, but also built the spiritual walls of the nation by campaigning against the cruelty of creditors to defaulting debtors and against the desecration of the holy Shabbos. ABY To subscribe to the KNOW YOUR BIBLE email list or consult our BIBLE COMMENTARY ARCHIVE, go to azamra.org/NaCh.shtml -- AZAMRA INSTITUTE PO Box 50037 Jerusalem 91500 Israel azamra.org
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 08:06:45 +0000
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